Inside Levi's Made Here

We've been fans and followers of Jay Carroll's blog One Trip Pass for several years now. OTP is the bookmark you click when you're dragging-ass through the workday and need to escape--think of it as a road trip away from the workaday drudgery towards the Californian treehouse in your mind. So when we heard that Levi's had brought Jay on board its concept design team, we thought "smart move"--then wondered what the hell he might be doing there. The answer is a new project called Made Here in which Jay scours America for talented (and endangered) craftspeople and brings their handiwork into the three higher-end boutique-type stores Levi's has opened in three cities across the U.S. Below, we debut the first video from Jay's series, and get him to explain more about the project.

What's your gig at Levi's?
I work on the concept team in design, developing new ideas. Then I'm also doing this Made Here project with the three unique neighborhood stores we just opened in Malibu, Boston (on Newbury Street), and the Meatpacking District in New York.

What's Made Here about?
I find craftspeople in America that still make things by hand using dying trades or revised takes on an old craft. I either buy their stuff outright and sell it in the stores, or we work on a special exclusive product that involves their particular skills. The idea is to curate an assortment of goods for the neighborhood stores and tell those crafts-people's stories.

What differentiates those three stores from every other Levi's stores?
They have the best of the Levi's mainline products--it's a tighter edit. Then a couple of them have L.V.C. which stands for Levi's Vintage Clothing. That's our higher end line. And then they also have Made Here. Basically the three stores just have an added dimension.

Can you talk about some of the craftsmen you're working with?
Sure. At the Malibu store we have wooden surfboards handmade by a guy up in San Francisco. We carry his boards and tell his story in the store. Down the road we might do an event where he comes and talks about his process, how he shapes a wooden board, that kind of thing.
I'm doing a series of three minute video vignettes on the different people we're working with and the first one is on Tim Whitten. Tim lives in Maine and has had a lifelong fascination with knotwork. He went to school and got an engineering degree and learned decorative knotwork through that lens.

The first person I started working with is a Native American woman named Carol Lindhorse who lives in Cave Junction, Oregon. She lives in the boonies out past town on a horse farm and she makes handmade moccasins. She's been doing beading and leather work since she was a kid. When I order from her I just say, "Make a bunch. Make whatever you would make." The beauty is in the assortment. Then there's stuff that is somehow just inherently Levi's. There's a guy who has a vintage store called Junkyard Jeans in Boise, Idaho. He had a big business selling vintage Levi's and then at some point he stumbled upon a chain-stitch embroidery machine. The quality of new embroidery can't compare to the old chain-stitch and he fell in love with it and taught himself how to do it. We work with him to make one-offs on vintage Big E Trucker jackets. He does these beautiful back panel embroideries and you can only get those in the neighborhood stores.

When you start a project like this do you know how long it will run?
I'm looking to build long term relationships with these people. As long as it works out, we'll continue to develop new goods together.